This is one of the most exuberant debuts I’ve ever read. Precious few poets go so undaunted by the extravagant plastic possibilities of syntax; fewer still so readily measure their lines “in thumbprints or dumplings/in trees not planted or one-syllable birdcalls.” To be enthused once meant to be possessed by a god, and indeed these poems recall sibylline speech, alternately sublime and divinely silly. The only check on Drewes’ channeling of music’s alternative knowledge is her rigorous intelligence, which she employs to make of failure—to love, to understand, or to come to terms with an experience—a durable enchantment. By her sights, these failures take flight as poems as light and artfully made as kites. By dint of feint and sleight of hand, they zephyr upward fueled by accident, swerve, and skew.

She was wont to study snails instead of circuits, comets instead of chemical equations, entropy instead of fusion.

Simple seed, succulent neuron. Let’s all grow plump and blow me a bubble. A message in a bottle.

One is a synonym for success and failure, simultaneously. Are you simultaneous?

Do you love the yolk as much as the shell?

Steffi Drewes is the author of the chapbooks Magnetic Forest, Cartography Askew, and History of Drawing Circles. Her work has also appeared in various journals, including 6×6, Zen Monster, The East Bay Review, Eleven Eleven, Monday Night, and the anthology It’s night in San Francisco but it’s sunny in Oakland (Timeless, Infinite Light). She is the founder of Featherboard Writing Series and manages the Writer in Residence program at Aggregate Space Gallery in Oakland. Tell Me Every Anchor Every Arrow (Kelsey Street Press) is her first full-length publication.